Will Congress Manage to Scuttle the 2020 Census?

Politico has an article noting that the 2020 Census in the U.S. may already be in trouble because of a variety of technical glitches that the General Accounting Office has been pushing it to resolve. The tenor of the article is that things are falling apart at the Census Bureau. 

The 2010 census was remarkably low-tech. Americans couldn’t fill the form out online, despite the fact that high-speed internet had become ubiquitous throughout the country. Census Bureau employees followed up with non-responders by knocking on doors, but their use of basic information, like address lists and maps, was so poor that of the 48 million houses they visited, 14 million were vacant. 

The bureau believes it can save more than $5 billion in 2020 by updating such information, allowing Americans to fill out the survey online, and more efficiently managing labor-intensive follow-up work, such as by identifying vacant houses. In addition, the agency is also working to modernize and consolidate its survey data collection systems.

The article hints at, but doesn't really give proper weight to what most demographers think is the big problem at the Census Bureau--insufficient funding. Terri Ann Lowenthal blogged about this just a few days ago.

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives decided it believes in fairy godmothers. The Appropriations Committee capped Fiscal Year 2016 spending on 2020 Census planning at $400 million, less than two-thirds of the President’s $663 million request. Even that was too much for the full House, which cut another $117 million from the Periodic Censuses and Programs account, with a significant chunk presumably eating away further at 2020 Census funding.

This of course follows several years now of inadequate funding, thereby eroding staffing and resources at the Census Bureau. It was chilling to hear Senator Ted Cruz at last night's Republican debate tick off the federal departments he would close if he were elected President. The Commerce Department, which houses the Census Bureau, was on his top five list.

The idea that any country will be better off if we have less data, and lower quality data, is just beyond me, and I genuinely do not understand the members of Congress who continually seek to cut back the funding for the Census and related survey programs such as the American Community Survey.

Is Unhappiness a Factor in Rising Death Rates Among Middle Aged Whites?

Tonight's Republican Candidates Debate on Fox Business News featured a lot of discussion about how awful things are for the American middle class. Jobs have gone overseas, and the jobs that remain pay less than in the old days. College is expensive and useless. Income inequality is a real problem. The glib answer, of course, is "Let's Make America Great Again!" There was no real discussion of differences by race/ethnicity, but there was a general theme that we're not happy. That message is, in fact, borne out by the analysis of data recently published by one of my SDSU colleagues, psychology professor Jean Twenge. She is the author of "Generation Me", which focused on people born in the 80s and 90s, but this new study looks at Americans of all ages and examines trends in self-reported happiness over time, drawn from the General Social Survey. The title of the paper tells you what she and her co-authors found: "More Happiness for Young People and Less for Mature Adults: Time Period Differences in Subjective Well-Being in the United States, 1972–2014."

Recent adolescents are happier and more satisfied with their lives than adolescents in past decades and generations; how- ever, adults over age 30 are less happy than their predecessors. While adults over age 30 were once happier than young adults aged 18–29, the two groups did not differ in happiness by the early 2010s, and the positive correlation between age and hap- piness found in past eras disappeared by the early 2010s. Similarly, the happiness advantage of mature adults over adolescents has dwindled. Mixed-effects models show that these effects were primarily due to time period rather than generation/cohort. While previous studies of adults found few time period effects in happiness (Yang, 2008), we find that the time trend differs based on age, with opposite trends for young people versus mature adults.

The time period in which happiness declined amongst adults is eerily similar to the time trend in the rise in death rates among middle aged whites from drugs, poisoning, and suicide, as has been discussed a lot since the Case-Deaton was published last week. You can see this for yourself the graph below. Correlation is not causation, but these findings are provocative, you have to admit.

More Gender Equality is Required for Higher Birth Rates in Low Fertility Nations

Steven Erlanger of the NYTimes has a very good article today reminding readers that in low-fertility societies the best way to bring birth rates back up to replacement level is to increase gender equality in all aspects of society, but especially in domestic affairs. Readers of my book will be very familiar with this notion, which I first picked up nearly 20 years ago in an article by French demographer Jean Claude Chesnais published in Population Development Review (volume 22, number 4, pp. 729-39) in which he contrasted fertility in France and Italy and noted that the lower status of women in Italy was the likely reason for Italy having a lower birth rate than France. Although both countries had opened up educational and labor force opportunities for women, once married, women in Italy were expected to be traditional stay-at-home moms, with little societal support for child care and little in-home domestic help from her husband. This pattern has also prevailed in Asia and helps to explain the very low birth rates in that part of the world, just as it does it in eastern and southern Europe. 

The NYTimes story does not give you that back story, but it is a revealing article nonetheless, with good quotes from Oxford demographers David Coleman, Francesco Billari, and Stuart Gietel-Basten, as well as Swedish demographer Gunnar Andersson.

The story also notes, of course, that the wave of refugees coming into Europe will help to boost the birth rate down the road, although the effect will be relatively small because the migrants will still represent a fairly small fraction of the total population.

Does Insecurity About Retirement Scare Middle Aged Whites to Death?

There have been a few new twists to the story about rising death rates among middle aged whites, especially those with lower levels of education. As the Upshot group at the NYTimes noted today, a researcher at Columbia University, Andrew Gelman, looked at aged-adjusted rates within the 45-54 age group and concluded that at least some of the rise is due to fact that over time the 45-54 age group is more weighted to the older end of that age range, where death rates are, of course, higher. Anne Case and Angus Deaton then produced more numbers to illuminate the problem.

Based on his reading of the more detailed Case-Deaton numbers, Mr. Gelman wrote, “mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54 increased by an average of about 4% after controlling for age.” The increase was 12 percent without the age adjustment, suggesting that age bias accounted for about two-thirds of the increase — but did not entirely explain the increase. 

Ultimately, both sides of the exchange agree on a fundamental fact: The recent mortality trends for middle-aged whites look significantly worse than they do for many other groups. “Their key claim,” Mr. Gelman writes, “is that death rates among middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. slightly increased, even while corresponding death rates in other countries declined by about 30%.”

One impact of this change in interpretation is that perhaps "smaller" issues can explain what's going on. One of the possible explanations is the rise in the use of prescription opioids for pain. However, this week's Economist notes that this phenomenon has not been peculiar to the US. Another issue raised by Case and Deaton in their article is the economic uncertainty over the past decade and half, and they point to retirement funding, in particular:

The United States has moved primarily to defined-contribution pension plans with associated stock market risk, whereas, in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are still the norm. Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on US workers, if they perceive stock market risk harder to manage than earnings risk, or if they have contributed inadequately to defined-contribution plans.

The key phrase here is "if they perceive." Another article in the Economist suggests that a large share of people approaching retirement in the United States are not financially prepared for retirement, although to be sure the change from defined benefit to defined contribution (DC) is a factor:

The problem is that many people simply do not save enough in a DC pension. The combined contributions of employers and employees average just 11.3% of salary. This will not generate the same level of pension as a typical defined-benefit plan. The CRR found that the average retirement assets of those aged 50-59 were just $110,000 in 2013, slightly lower than in 2010. This balance will improve over time, since DC plans are relatively new, but there is a long way to go. If pensioners take an (inflation-adjusted) 4% a year from their pot, they will need $250,000 just to generate an income of $10,000.

These numbers should scare all of us, not just those who aren't saving enough. We have an economy that is overly reliant on consumer spending and emphasizes going into debt to do that, rather than saving for the future. None of us will be better off if a lot of people start falling by the wayside in old age.

New Book Out on Spatial Demography

If you are interested in spatial demography, as I am, then you must get yourself a copy of the new book just out titled "Recapturing Space: New Middle-Range Theory in Spatial Demography", edited by Frank M. Howell, Jeremy R. Porter, and Stephen A. Matthews, and published by Springer. Now, I admit that the title may not sizzle, but it's a very good book and I say that not just because I have a chapter in there. Check it out, and put on it on your holiday gift list. 

If you aren't interested in spatial demography, then we need to figure out why not!